


Shoots And Ladders

by PaxVobis



Series: Original Album Series [1]
Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: Arrest, Axl Rose References, Backstory, Child Abuse, Coming of Age, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, F/M, Family Secrets, Fist Fights, Growing Up, Half-Siblings, Heavy Angst, Historical - Not Between Featured Characters, Hospitalization, Illegitimacy, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Invasion of Privacy, Kid-Klok, Korn References, Lesbophobia, POV Seth, Past Sexual Abuse, Physical Abuse, Pre-Klok, Rehabilitation, Running Away, Self-Harm, Starvation, Teen Romance, Teenage Rebellion, Trans Male Character, Transphobia, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Verbal Abuse, Younger Seth, delinquency, pre-transition, trans pickles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-02-03 08:47:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12744966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaxVobis/pseuds/PaxVobis
Summary: Pickles is not often inclined to speak about his childhood, but there is one person who knows it almost as well as he knows himself.  Through the thin walls of their family home, Seth can hear just about everything - his family's secrets, their arguments, their lies.  Backstory with a focus on growing up trans and brutal in a hostile, conservative environment.M15+ Only, implied sexual assault and child abuse, explicit drug abuse.





	Shoots And Ladders

**Author's Note:**

> Some gnarly stuff in here, but very little in detail. A warning ahead of time for sexual assault and implied past incestual abuse, and the usual for underage drinking, drug use, and physical and verbal child abuse.

In the summer of his fourteenth year, Pickles went berserk.

It would be wrong to imply that there had been no warning signs, or that this was the beginning of the trouble – it wasn’t, everyone knew that, the kid had been a delinquent since grade school.  An open secret for his otherwise respectable family.  Even with the detentions and truancy aside there was a record stacking up, of trespassing, vandalism, theft, and as Pickles had gotten older, so the crimes had become predictably more adult in nature.

There was the liquor, for one.  At twelve and thirteen, Pickles was still too obviously tiny to acquire alcohol on his own and restricted to begging older kids and adult creeps who’d stoop to plying an actual child with booze, but by fourteen he was starting to get a feel for fake IDs and riding to adjacent towns to do the dirty work himself at any liquor store dodgy enough to ignore it.  A twelve year old pulled up for intoxication and dropped off on his parents’ doorstep reeking of booze was tragic, every blind in the street crooked aside as curious neighbours watched on; a fourteen year old in the same situation was just a social menace.  Molly shepherding her child in quickly and apologising to the police officers, trying to keep it looking as much like an accident as possible. 

Within the family home, things went a little further.  When Calvert found out that the kid had his picture behind the counter of every liquor store in Lincoln County and had been hitching lifts as far as Green Bay to obtain alcohol – disappearing for days, sometimes – the man had hit the roof.  Seth could hear it from his bedroom upstairs, when Pickles finally came home; Seth’s bedroom was directly above the living room and he heard a lot more, he thought, than his parents actually figured.  Pickles probably had a hunch, because Pickles was incredibly bright, dangerously so, but to a fourteen year old the twelve year old Seth was just a dumb kid.  But he’d heard every word, curled up under the covers, resenting the whole lot of them for making him feel that way – making him feel scared and conflicted, like there were sides to choose, until Pickles stomped up the stairs in his oversized biker boots, swearing all the way up, and Seth could follow his steps ascending and then clomping into his room adjacent, slamming the door, throwing himself onto his bed with a dull bang of the springs, and his scream of rage smothered from under his pillow.

Likewise, it had only been a matter of time until Pickles started to notice boys, and Molly (a wild child herself, once, in the rollicking 60s) had kept a hawklike watch on her daughter for any sign of canoodling with local bad boys.  Because then Pickles was Seth’s sister, although as young as thirteen he’d been wearing oversized shirts and flannels and saying he was a boy when confronted by anyone who didn’t already know him, and being a ginger-haired freak delinquent in a small city, that didn’t leave a lot of people.  Really they should have seen it coming.  Really, he’d been telling them for years, but they wilfully liked to believe him someone else.  Pickles begged to differ – and, to Molly’s relief, if her daughter was crazy, at least she wasn’t _boy_ crazy.  In fact, Pickles had noticed.  Just not  _boys._

With his bedroom sharing a wall with Pickles’, Seth knew about the girls long before their parents did.  It had started as Pickles happening to be walking home from school a couple of feet behind Seth and his friends, overhearing them talking about a particular girl from a class a few years above them.  Pickles had come up behind them with his hands deep in his pockets, Seth and his friends growing silent as they heard him catch up to them and expecting him to scold them for talking that way about a girl – sometimes, Molly’s best weapon against Seth was Pickles himself, as under the heat Pickles would happily betray his brother’s misbehaviour for a scapegoat – but instead he’d said, “Jenny?  She’s _cold_.  A total fox, _dude..._ ”

And “Huh, jesus, what would you do, bump fuckin’ pussies?” drilled Seth rudely, and Pickles stared him down, but said nothing, only drawing vicious hoots from the other boys.

That was the first Seth had ever heard of a _girl_ liking another _girl_.  He guessed all girls were pretty and so it was normal to be able to recognise that, and Pickles was just saying it like that.  He’d been rhetorical, used language picked up off older boys, and Seth couldn’t wrap his head around how two girls might actually do that – a physical impossibility.  It had seemed like a fluke until Pickles was pulled out of a tree in his classmate Shelly’s backyard by her brother and dragged down the street squealing until the guy realised he was _that Pickles chick_ and not a perving boy like he’d assumed.  Seth had heard about it the next day at school, laughter about how Pickles was so besotted with Shelly that he had climbed the tree just so he could sit there and wish he was her.  But there was another terrible truth there, and Seth didn’t realise it until Pickles got a girlfriend.

Her name was Josie.  She was fourteen.  She was in Pickles’ class and she was a very very good girl, beautiful in a plain, girl-next-door way with good middle-class parents; if Seth had been dating her Molly and Calvert would have rejoiced, and if Pickles had framed her as a _friend_ and their meetings as innocent sleepovers maybe he would have gotten away with it – but by that point, their parents were long past believing anything innocent about their eldest.  Seth would never know how the two of them had come together but come together they definitely did, in secret, with Pickles sneaking her into the house late at night.  A chorus of _shhhh!_ s and giggles from the stairwell as Seth was reading violent comics by the light of a torch under his blankets.  The door to Pickles’ room closing, then soft voices that Seth could barely catch: _Awe, but I wish I could play ya my records, baby._   Baby... and then a type of muffled silence that could only be the sound of teenagers sucking face.  And later, the scrape of Pickles pushing his dresser in front of the door.

The next morning, Pickles wouldn’t come out of his room no matter how Molly banged on the door and rattled the handle and slammed it into the dresser on the other side, no matter how much she yelled at him.  Eventually she gave up and drove Seth to school, making a real fuss of it since usually the two kids walked, but they must have come back for Pickles and gotten him out somehow. He did not come to school that day.

There were chips in the white paint on Pickles’ doorway from when Calvert dragged him out and he lashed out with his feet, scratches where his nails had been pulled around the corner, as Pickles never went down without a fight.  Seth had heard them before from his room, as he and Molly both chose to turn a blind eye to it, the screaming and thumps of Pickles’ feet and shoulders against the floor and walls, the slap of his hands hooked on a doorframe or the bannister as he was wrestled downstairs, shrieking. 

Seth thought it was a bit much; he’d been hit by their father before and it – wasn’t that bad.  You know, it hurt or whatever, but he knew where he’d fucked up and took it like a man.  But Pickles was a girl then, and a fourteen year old one at that, and he shrieked and swore and squealed like a cat thrown into a fireplace.  Seth was not afraid of Calvert and what Calvert could do, but he was afraid of Pickles, that sound he made.  It sounded like a horror movie, a slasher, then after Calvert backhanded him across the face for kicking up a noise the neighbours would hear, pulled back in the throat into a feral snarl, punctuated with violent words and spitting, and he knew from seeing Calvert nursing his pride in the living room after the inevitable beating, bites and scratches too, enough to draw blood.

When Seth came home that afternoon Pickles was upstairs, sitting on his bed with a bruise swollen on his cheekbone, and Seth could see this because the door to his room had been taken off its  hinges and taken down to the basement with Pickles’ drum kit.  No more privacy, his right had been removed; Pickles shot him a monstrous, green-eyed look through the doorway but didn’t move an inch.  Just sat there.

It turned out that all those nights Pickles had just vanished into nowhere he’d actually been going to Josie’s house.  Molly and Calvert had been worried but too exhausted to be afraid anymore, as this had been a routine set when Pickles was twelve (Seth had heard some older boys found him down by the rail bridge with a stash of stolen beers stowed in the mud – he moved on to other hiding spaces later that no one ever found) but this was a special case.  Yes, for once Pickles was actually content to pretend he was a girl, a ruse (it eventuated later) that he and Josie had planned, dressing their adolescent experimentation up as innocent friendship, waiting for time alone, and then sucking face. 

Josie’s parents never actually found out that element – in fact, Pickles had been thrown out of their house for bringing their daughter stolen alcohol, after the parents had found a bottle carelessly abandoned under her bed.  With Pickles kicked out and Josie heartbroken, imagining herself a Juliet martyred by an unfair universe, the two had escaped to Pickles’ house to prolong their romance. Now Pickles had been beaten and banned from interacting with Josie, and the girl had been returned to her parents.  They were moved to opposite sides of the classroom and otherwise prevented from talking to each other at any opportunity that presented itself.  Molly and Calvert hated the implication, of catching two teen girl rebels locked in a room together, and quickly shoved it aside, deciding they would just put up a wall between the children.

But the worst punishment was the door.  Seth was all of twelve and couldn’t _imagine_ not having a bedroom door, for, y’know, _reasons_.  He didn’t know how girls pulled that shit off but assumed, you know, there was a _way_.  Pickles tended to just sit on his bed and stare out the door once it was gone, or else play guitar, the twang of nylon strings louder now without the barrier.  He was getting good, something that drove Seth around the bend since the guitar had been bought for _him_.  Pickles had the drum kit, a gesture of defeat from their parents and a half-hearted attempt to give him an outlet for his anger, and it had worked, for a while. 

But then Pickles was just lying flat on his bed, drunk, with the guitar clutched to his body.  “Nup.  Don’t wanna, I got the drums down.  I’m good.”  Seth just glaring at him from the doorway as the kid ripped out Black Sabbath, Runaways, Heart, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, King Crimson.  Anything he heard, glittering up from those fingers – or down in the basement where the drums were eventually abandoned, blaring in his headphones while he bashed those skins, in another world entirely in his mind of fast cars and beautiful girls as far away from Tomahawk as he could get. 

Yeah, Seth recognised the songs, cassettes Pickles smuggled home from trips across towns he took on weekends, probably stolen, and played on his Walkman or – when Calvert worked in the town over and Molly took her sleeping pills – softly late at night on their stereo in the lounge, Pickles knelt on the rug with the bright cases scattered around him intoxicated and in rapture.  Until Calvert had come home unexpectedly one night and discovered it, clipping the kid around the head and unplugging the stereo, and then the screaming had followed, Seth standing on the staircase with his back against the wall, hidden, listening as his father called Pickles a whore and trouble and brandishing Mötley Crüe’s _Girls Girls Girls_ \- _is this what you want?  Huh?  To be someone’s slut?_   And then made him watch as he smashed them under his heel.  Every single one.

Looking up at Seth over his guitar, _Seth’s_ guitar, picking off riffs from Asia’s new album, effortlessly.  _Effortlessly_.  They’d only heard the single last week.  Unbreakable in his arrogance.

“Yeah.  Gonna save up, go to Milwaukee and be in a band and shit.  I got connections.”

The fucking _bitch._

But more and more he simply wasn’t there – like that guitar was the only thing that held him there, marching up the stairs to play until he passed out, and then gone for school before Seth was even awake.  Or gone during the night, sleeping early like a corpse on his bed and then vanished by morning.  Pickles still attended school, his truancy even dropping after Molly had threatened to put him on the streets if he didn’t graduate, but then a different campaign was launched by the kid.  See, following the Josie incident, in the schoolyard, Pickles had been branded queer, and that was when the fights began.

There had been fights before of course, but they only got serious after this idea that Pickles was not a _real girl_ began to spread.  Instead of pulling punches, the boys Pickles had a habit of talking back to followed through into black eyes and bloody noses, and Pickles gave back equal and then some.  Roll on suspensions, the first one coming after a kid’s nose got smashed by Pickles’ fist – Molly scolding him as she collected him from the office, and Pickles loudly talking back at her about how the boys had threatened to do _bad shit_ to him; he just didn’t give them a chance to follow through.  Molly shushed him, despaired that Calvert had taught him to think with his fists.

This quickly carried into the home as well.  Seth and Pickles had always fought and fought tooth and nail, but the first time Pickles really drew blood was that summer.  It was about the band idea, which had grown from Milwaukee to Los Angeles, this neon dream that Pickles had gotten real hung up on all of a sudden.  Seth, who had absolutely no control of his tongue, let slip the nasty comment straight from his father’s book: _What, so you can be some faggot’s fuckin’ whore?_ and for that, Pickles screamed _I’ll fuckin’ kill you!_ and tackled him, and both children went down the stairs one over another, and the next thing Seth knew was hands around his throat and Pickles’ hot breath panted in rage and how it smelt like bourbon, until Molly came and dragged Pickles off by his ear.

“Pickles!  What are you _doing_ to him?  God, how many times do I have to do this!  Go to your room!”

But it was no good.  Since Pickles was unable to be, like, _locked_  in his room anymore, due to not having a door, it was Seth who was locked away instead after a superficial chiding and Pickles ‘grounded’ in so many words, but by then he’d worked out how to scale the house down the pipes outside his window and vanish into the night. 

When he was gone, Molly and Calvert fought.  Seth figured they knew how thin the walls were because he never heard them argue _about Pickles_ when they knew Pickles was home (although there had been times they had assumed he’d left, or hadn’t heard him sneak back in, when harsh words were thrown and the kid’s ears must have burned with them).  It was overhearing these that he came to know that Pickles was a Girl That Was Wicked, a devil child – like that chick in the Exorcist, a girl possessed. 

Now the family wasn’t the church-going type but they were _good, clean Americans_ , you know, and Seth could hear the fear in his mother’s voice when she confessed that Pickles was too much for her, was more than she could have ever imagined dealing with.  She was convinced the kid was poisoned by hormones, sneaking out for _boys_ and Molly was terrified by that, of how much her daughter could be hurt, just a child out on the streets like that.  Calvert thought it probably had more to do with the alcohol, and when they were closer to the end of their leashes, he blamed it on Molly drinking during her pregnancy. 

On nights when he himself had been drinking, other accusations came out.  That what did she expect.  She hadn’t been much better (and everyone knew that, in fact, even Seth had overheard that gossiped between mothers at school, waiting for Molly to pick him and Pickles up) and the kid had that fucking deadbeat, fucking... _child molester_ in his blood, if only Molly hadn’t been so _stupid_... but these conversations always ended with their mother crying, and while Calvert could be cruel it did not come naturally to him, and he said sorry, and the two of them fell quiet again, concluding: something had to be done about Pickles.

So it was that Seth worked out that the devil’s eyes, which Pickles had, violent green things, did not mean some horned, forked tongued beast.  There was a schoolyard rumour to the same effect, one kid having turned up an Irish bastard, red headed, green eyed, and the second a ruddy brown, hazel eyed, looking just like their – his – father.  When Seth barked it out over dinner with just his parents, he was subject to the worst thrashing of his life and then harshly warned not to talk about his mother like that, and that if he said a _word_ to Pickles he’d find himself out on his ass on the cold streets.  The kid didn’t need that on top of everything else.  Well, Seth didn’t like the sound of that and besides, he didn’t remember another father.  The fucker must have beat it before he was even born.  It was none of his goddamn business.

And frankly, he was starting to get sick of _everything_ being about Pickles.  What about Seth?  Why was everything _always_ about his stupid, alcoholic, lezzy, slutty, bastard sister?  Pickles wasn’t even here most of the time and everything was still all about him!  Seth heard rumours at school of where he went, crashing on friends couches out of town, being seen with girls in Gilbert, in Woodboro, in Wausau, dressing as a boy.  When Pickles was fifteen he was arrested for trespassing, jumping the barbed wire fence to a public pool with a girl in the middle of the night, they’d thought he was a boy delinquent when they’d picked him up with his manky red hair down nearly to his waist and the flannel shirt tied around his hips, blood on his hands and tears in his clothes.  Grinning to himself even as the cuffs went on.  Fucking  _beaming_ just at that.

But he was brought home again in a police car with only a fine to his name, and Calvert made him mow lawns to pay it off and grounded him for real this time, semi-succeeding in trapping him in the house and cutting his use of the phone.  Pickles still showed up at school, monitored closely by his teachers, and he still apparently passed his tests fine when he was there though the fights had become more brutal, hair-ripping stuff, and he slipped off grounds often to drink.  When he was home Pickles was always hammered, in his room asleep or on Seth’s guitar, or down in the basement with the drums if Calvert was out.  But mostly asleep.  It was easier, he said when Seth asked him, if he had to stay, to sleep through their parents, even if it meant no dinner – Seth suspected him of raiding their mother’s sleeping pills too, though she never mentioned it herself.  There were new songs on the guitar now, and a deep sadness in them, and late at night through the thin walls Seth could hear Pickles weep hysterically until he fell asleep again.  And he still said he was gonna leave.  Just as soon as he could afford it.  But he couldn’t hold down a job for more than a week so... Seth didn’t know how the hell he thought he was gonna achieve that.

As for the count of ‘slut’, Seth only knew what people at school had mentioned to him.  Pickles had no friends in Tomahawk anymore, only out of town, and out of town there were only girls and since you couldn’t fuck girls as a girl (thought Seth, naive) there must have been guys too.  Apparently Pickles wasn’t doing much better, and had been laughed out of the diner local to the school after confessing out of frustration that he didn’t know how to fuck a girl, so what had they even been doing?  Just making out, really, he didn’t like, _know_ , whatever!  And the boys he’d been sitting with or like, near, anyway, older boys who were sons of Molly’s friends who had taken Seth under their wing and that he idolised and followed around, and whose conversations Pickles occasionally tried to hijack, trying to feel more like a boy, had laughed him out of the place as a fucking dyke and virgin.

But there had to be boys.  You weren’t really a slut if there were no boys, right?  Even though Seth heard other boys call Pickles fucking ugly, dyke, feral, freak, tourettes, dog bait, bitch, none of the things they called girls they _wanted_ to sleep with, Seth was now thirteen and aware it didn’t work that way.  It wasn’t about whether Pickles _looked_ attractive, but about what he’d do, and so it didn’t surprise Seth to eventually hear from some of those older boys he looked up to, Bobby and Mitch, that Pickles had let them touch him up.  That was just natural, the next logical step for a kid as ruined as Pickles.

It _did_ surprise him to find out he’d been there the whole time.  It had been at Thanksgiving, held at Molly and Calvert’s house and host to a number of families.  All the kids - teenagers really, ranging from a few younger than Seth at eleven and twelve to the ringleader of the boys, who was sixteen - had been exiled to the refurbished garage to leave the lounge and kitchen free for drunk adults.  Attached to the house, it had a small loft built into the attic space intended for a workshop, but as Calvert was not very handy it had been surrendered to the kids long ago.  

There was a heater, an old TV and an NES brought over by one of the older boys.  A couple of bean bags, a couch generously retired from the main house upstairs carried up by their fathers in a season past.  Pickles’ drums had been here once, long since exiled downstairs after noise complaints and hurricane warnings.  Cheap carpet, bare wood walls.  The game system made an impression on Seth and he sat glued to it for almost the entirety of the party, watched by the younger children as he chugged through the high scores on _Duck Hunt_ and rejoicing over the little plastic gun, an arcade _in his own home_.  

Pickles was incredibly stoned that day, lying on the couch watching Seth play and listening to the older kids gossip, in and out of consciousness.  When anyone tried to talk to him, he’d just stare into space.  Pickles did not want to be at the family event.  Their mother had plaited his hair, managing to corner him as he was already sedated from raiding her medicine cabinet in the dark hours earlier that morning, and he resented it deeply.  Even without the medication he was in a low energy period, so to speak, and getting him to move anywhere was difficult – largely a relief to their parents, but still physically difficult.

When Seth and the younger kids were lured back into the main house for dessert, Pickles was unmoveable.  Mitch and Bobby stayed behind with him to give the system a go and no one thought much of it.  And you know, said Mitch, he was so out of it he barely moved when they sat down with him and pulled up his shirt, and Bobby could just hold his hands together to stop him pawing at them, and then he just _let_ them – and then –

And then Seth told them to shut the fuck up, he didn’t _want_ _to_ _know_.  Jesus!  That was fucking skanky shit.  So Pickles was a slut, whatever.  They didn’t have to _tell_ him about it.  When they’d come back for the NES, Pickles had been asleep on the couch where they left him.  Seth hadn’t thought much of it, so.  It mustn’t have been shit to Pickles, y’know.  Just more boys or whatever, and he was a slut, like Seth had suspected all along, like everyone had said.  So whatever.

And it didn't fucking matter to him what Pickles did with his body.  Largely like his parents, Seth saw this as just embarrassing, but unlike them it didn't tarnish his reputation any.  He was clawing his way up the rungs from ‘gremlin child’ to ‘bad boy’, nudging ‘we need to talk about Kevin’ on his way, his own indiscretions involving vicious words and blows and pulled pigtails in the schoolyard, vandalism and petty arson, overlooked by adults in favour of Pickles' walking disaster but respected by other children.  It didn't matter at all how wacked out his sister was, until they were fighting, and then it was knives out.

Pickles' pill popping had kept him at bay for most of that winter and only increased after Thanksgiving.  He barely went out at all, partly due to the cold, partly due to - Seth glossed over it, pretended he knew what it was rather than face his own complicity.  Instead it was shame for being a slut.  Too mortified to face anyone outside.  The word had gotten around the school fast with the boys boasting.  Pickles skipped particular classes with particular boys and vanished, eventually found huddling under a desk in the empty but heated arts classroom during these periods with another girl, a shy, dark-haired bookworm named Adelaide, both of them dragged out and frog-marched to the Principal's office. 

Having been caught on _school grounds_ canoodling this time, the two were quickly redirected to the counsellor.  Adelaide, terrified, told the counsellor everything through her tears - about Pickles saying he was secretly a boy and dressing like a boy and talking like a boy, about him meeting her in hidden places to kiss and tell secrets, about big white pills pulled out of pockets supplied by punks out of town and water bottles filled with alcohol, about how he said his parents and his brother hated him, how home wasn't safe, and stories of rock stars and dark, dark things both real and imaginary.  And about him cutting himself with an art room scalpel in front of her saying he didn’t feel shit, you know, didn’t feel real or shit. 

All this was put in a letter and the letter was given to Molly when Pickles was picked up from his entrapment in the administration building that afternoon.  Pickles was sent upstairs to his room immediately and when Seth got home, having walked alone, his brother was asleep and his mother was crying in the kitchen, and that was  _way_  too much to deal with so Seth went straight upstairs, back to his comics.  The crying only stopped after Calvert came home.  Seth lay still on his bed and listened as Molly came upstairs and spoke gently to Pickles.  He didn't catch what about, but Pickles didn't like it and squealed at her.   _No!  You can't be serious!  I didn't do nothin', Mom, she’s a liar!_   _They’re lyin’ to ya Mam, I never did nothin’, oh, no!  You can’t do that!  I ain’t crazy, Mam!_

Whatever their fight was about, Molly appeared to have won, to have found the magic word that scared Pickles into obedience.  Suddenly, Pickles was going to try.  He wore a skirt for the first time since middle school, below the knee even, and stayed home outside of school, even handed over his Walkman to Calvert in punishment for his indiscretions with Adelaide.  Appearing at dinner more than one night in a row - but not saying much at all, leaving his room only for food, bathroom, or his beloved drum kit – or to raid Molly’s pills, skimming them off her prescription and expired bottles in the dead of night, a rattle of tablets on plastic picked up by Seth’s pricking ears.  Otherwise he simply acted like he was in prison, waiting out a sentence.  A muted silence made only more oppressive by the blanket of snow that covered the town outside. 

It annoyed Seth, mostly.  When Pickles had started to calm he'd hoped he'd have his childhood playmate back - or at least his goddamn guitar.  But Pickles was trying hard not to fight, and when Seth tried to playfully rile him, he could see his brother turn pale with rage and move excruciatingly slowly, battling not to belch up his anger at Seth.  Then at some point a few weeks into the silence, it stopped being a game, and Seth started to lash out in spite instead, to trap Pickles, to make him fall. 

Because he was not a good girl.  He was a bad, fucked up, ugly, feral, awful girl, a rotten girl, a bad girl and bad at being a girl too.  A girl possessed by a boy, possessed by anger, a spitting, biting, screaming, drinking, drugging, cussing, feral child, a child smarter than the bullshit that Seth could do nothing but accept, a Girl Which Was Wicked.  In his confused way, Seth refused to believe this passive creature, blanched by the anger that ebbed below the sedated, dead-faced surface, was his sister.  He only wanted to see the danger and brightness he remembered, bitter that his mother and Pickles himself had somehow taken it away.

So he baited him.  Worked on him.  Despised this surface child, this false sister.  Wanted to see him break.

Their fights were cold-blooded and vile, as soulless as the ice forms that spidered over their windows.  Pickles, comatose, spent few hours awake but those that he did were constantly interrupted by Seth's jabs.   _You call that a riff, Pickles?  Huh.  I dunno how you think you'll make it down in Killwuakee, you suck ass.  You'll have to blow guys just to --_ Pickles staring out the window, sat on the end of his bed with the guitar in his hands.  Then another tactic:  _Buy your own guitar.  This is mine._ The guitar reclaimed and stowed under Seth's bed, although he never played it, and Calvert on his side, telling Pickles not to protest and that it  _was_  Seth's guitar. 

So then silence again, or the drums in the basement.   _Whoever heard of a chick playin' drums anyway.  Girls are physically incapable of rockin' out and that's a fact._

Pickles, sans Walkman, pedalling quietly to a blank beat as he refused to even look at Seth.   _Just leave me alone, Seth._   And that just boiled his blood, y'know?  The fucking false bitch. 

Christmas was cold and lifeless.  Seth sat there in the lounge surrounded by his loving family, the roaring fireplace, the tree, the thoughtless presents Molly and Calvert had gotten them, and felt indescribably lonely.  Pickles was a shell, even thanked their mother for an insulting gift of a makeup kitbox and an instruction to make himself look pretty now he was growing into a woman, yadda yadda.  Seth could see how dead he was behind the eyes and how long he choked on his words, how slow they came out.  How shallow and fake his pleasantness was.  The faker.  The fucking faker.  And here was Seth being humped with fucking football shoes and  _That'll keep you out of trouble!_  as if Seth was trouble, as if Seth even played football!  He could have been sick.  He felt so fucking lonely, so fucking broken, and he hated Pickles for it.

But it didn't come to a head until spring, dinner again.  Pickles sitting there like a goddamn doll and staring through a side of beans like they had personally harmed him.  It was always the stupidest things they fought about and this time it was gravy.  A god damn gravy boat, and Molly's best attempt at a roast dinner which was adequate, they had all agreed.  Calvert politely asking, "Pickles, can you pass the gravy?" and Pickles not even registering he'd been spoken to, so lost in his own fakeness. 

When the silence just elongated, Calvert frowning at their eldest and then glancing at Molly, who shrugged, Seth couldn't resist jumping in.  "Pickles, pass Dad the gravy." 

His biting voice got Pickles' attention and he looked up, vague-faced, trying to clock what had just been said.  "Huh?"

"The gravy, dingus."

He could see Pickles riling even as he reached for the boat and pushed it apathetically towards Calvert.  "Okay," he mumbled, "Jeeze.  You don’t have to...” but trailed off there.

Their mother drew herself up, the pinnacle of American housewifedom just for that night post-roast success.  “Pickles is right, Sethy.  Ya shouldn’t talk that way to ya sister.”

And he could have swallowed it, but right at that moment, Seth hated Pickles’ guts.

“Oh, huh, sure!”  He could feel the bile coming up the back of his tongue as he fixed Pickles in his cocky, snot-nosed glare – or maybe that was Molly’s overcooked beans, huh.  “Cuz she’s so perfect all of a sudden!  Dang, I’m _sorry,_ Pickles.  Ya gotta be such a _good girl_ now don't ya, or else maybe they'll rat you out!”

“Seth,” warned Calvert, though uncertain, and Pickles glowered down the dinner table.  Seth only soured.  React, bitch!

“Can't let anyone step in on ya suckin' dick, huh, fuckin', gettin' practice for LA, right?” he said sweetly, and Pickles slammed down his fork but said nothing.  So close.  So damn close.  Seth curled his lip at him, flaring his nostrils as he spat, “Skank.”

An icy silence blanketed the table.  “Seth!” choked Molly eventually, gawking at him, and Seth sneered at her.

“Shut up Mam, it’s _true_.”

“Seth!”  This time it was Calvert, rising from the table to scold his son, but he had barely raised his hand to point at Seth before the kid had opened his mouth again.

“It’s _true_ , she fucked Mitch and Bobby!”

Seth saw the shock glance across his father’s face even as he raised his hands against the slap he expected, and then Pickles snarled from the other side of the table with this rabid, hare squeal, “Oh, you _bastard!_ ” and Calvert whipped right around to him, suddenly at a loss of which child to go for.

Seth had done it.  He’d broken Pickles, he could see by the mad turn in his eyes.  If Seth hadn’t been on the other side of the table, he’d have been choked out by now for sure.  Calvert was about to scold him, to snap, _Pickles, manners!_ but Pickles was way ahead of him, slamming his palms down on the table to the beat of his yells, “I hate you!  I fuckin’ hate you!  I’ll fuckin’ kill you for this Seth!”

“Pickles!” cried Molly, lurching in her seat to catch Pickles by the back of his jumper and haul him back before he lunged straight over the table at Seth.  “What in the hell!  Is he tellin' the truth?”

“No!  He’s a liar, he’s a fuckin’ filthy liar, fuckin’ – ”

But Seth just smirked at them as Pickles struggled in his mother’s grasp.  “It’s true, Mitch told me!” he declared, and Pickles was screaming again.

“NO.  NO.  NO.  NO.  NO.  NO.  NO.  NO.  FUCK YOU, I didn’t do shit, how fuckin' dare ya, I didn’t, Mam, let me at him, let me fuckin’ at him!”

Seth pushed his chair back abruptly, out of reach of Pickles’ swiping hands.  “He told me they fuckin’ finger banged her on the couch on Thanksgivin’ Mam, it’s true!” he yelped, and suddenly everyone was looking at Pickles.

“Pickles?” 

Pickles stared back, sinking down in his chair.  “I – _Mam!_   It wasn't my fault!” he cried, and that was the wrong thing to say.  Molly grabbed him instantly, her fingers twisting into his earlobe and her face a violent scowl, dragging him to his feet as she rose.

“It’s _true?? Pickles!!_ In our own _houseroom!?_   Gawd!”  The sounds Pickles was making as Molly wrung his ear were distressing, his fingers clawed but not quite touching his mother’s arm as she brought him down with only a pinch.  “How far do ya have to push me, huh, girl?? What did I do to deserve such a bad girl, huh? All this, girls and trouble and now, makin’ a whore outta herself!  _What did I do,_ huh, Pickles?  Gawd!”

“Gawd Mam let me go!  It ain’t my fault!  Gawd that _hurts!”_

The sounds, the way Molly was shaking Pickles by the shoulder now, crawled in Seth’s rotten guts and he knew he’d crossed the line.  And yet he couldn’t resist, seeing that bitch suffer for the way he’d made him feel so lonely.  “Ma, she's lyin', she was fuckin’ askin’ for it!  You know how she's like -- ” he yapped, and suddenly Calvert’s hand was on his shoulder, making him jump with the fear of the strike that would come next.

But it didn’t come.  Only Pickles crying as Molly grabbed him by the cheeks, holding his face up as he slumped to the floor before her, “Why can’t ya do anythin' right??  Would it _kill you_ Pickles to just _try?!_   What are we gonna _do_ with you?”

Calvert looked down at Seth with a steely, cold gaze, ignoring Pickles cries of _No Mam I tried I really tried it’s not my fault I was bein’ so good Mam no!_ , and Seth felt the fear in him – the fear of Molly in Calvert, and the fear of Calvert in himself.  “Go to your room, Seth,” said Calvert to him, and Seth met his gaze a second, faltered, and then slipped from beneath the hand on his shoulder, slinking to the door.

He lingered there a moment, watching his mother and Pickles claw at each other.  _No Mam no I don’t wanna go please please Mam I gatta I gatta I’m really tryin’!  Please Mam please!_

“Oh, no, young lady, I ain’t listenin’ to a word of your beggin’!  You made your bed, now ya gotta lie in it, that’s how it goes out there in the real world.  Come the mornin’, you’re out!” It was shocking, seeing the strong and wicked Pickles go down like that at just the touch of their mother.  But he repeated it to himself, _she deserves it.  She deserves it._

Then Calvert stared straight through him and raised a hand, pointing to the door as he barked, “ _GO TO YOUR ROOM._ ”  And Seth went, so frightened he ran up the stairs and slammed his bedroom door once he was safely inside.

Pickles’ howling didn’t stop until late into the night, finally chased upstairs to his room so their parents could discuss _what to do with her_.  Seth could hear him weeping through their shared wall.  When the morning came there were phone calls and voices downstairs, and Seth snoozed, uncertain what was happening around him until the screaming and banging started up again through the wall, and he was too afraid to stick his head out to find out what was happening, as Calvert snapped and Pickles screaming obscenities was muffled by his blankets as he cocooned himself protectively, buried in bed like it’d be his grave.

In the end it took Calvert putting a belt around the child’s middle where he was cowering in bed to get him out, the leverage to drag him bodily from the bed and down the corridor.  As he went, sprawled and hooking on the walls and doorframes, Seth could hear his hysterics, suddenly manifesting in a unhinged rhyme delivered in a childish sing-song as he was dragged forcibly, halting with every edge he caught:

_You are not my re-al father,_

_You are just my mother’s fucker!_

_You are not my re-al father,_

_You are just my mother’s fucker!_

And Seth wondered if it was a lucky guess, or if someone had told him, or if he’d just worked it out for himself.  If he really believed it.  But whatever, if it was meant to stop Calvert pulling him down the stairs, it didn’t succeed.

As soon as he locked hands on the stair rails, Pickles changed his tune.

 _IIIII!  WISSSSSSSH!  Ha-HA!  YOUUUUUUUUU!  WERE DEAAAAAAD!  AHhh-AH!  IIIIIIIIIII! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE!  YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!  I WISH YOUUUUUUUU, WERE ALL, DEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!_   _ALL OF YOUUUU!_

And when he was dragged past Molly downstairs, his throat scratching with the violence of his screams and weeping: _WHY DON’T YA DO ANYTHING?? I’M YA fuckin’ KID, MAM!!!  PROTECT ME!!!!_

And then the car doors slammed and the engine started, and that was the end of Pickles for a while.

Calvert calmly explained over dinner that Pickles was at a _special_ , say, school-type thing, like a camp – a retreat – Christian – for girls who were having... some trouble.  And they all agreed Pickles was having some trouble.  He’d be back soon, by summer.  And Calvert and Molly stank of shame.  Seth looked down at his dinner, knowing something had changed.  Suddenly there was a real consequence to acting out, at least in any way his parents could catch him at.  Pickles set a standard, you know, even if they felt like shit about it.  But hey.  At least he’d probably enjoy being locked in a dorm with all those fucked up girls.

Life was very, very quiet without Pickles.  A week passed, two, back at school with a strange space around where Pickles was supposed to be – too quiet, thought Seth, suspiciously quiet.  After the first week, Molly spoke on the phone to Pickles, Seth and Calvert sitting with her in the lounge, and “How’s it goin’ there, sweetie?” asked Molly with all the naïve optimism in the world, and then suddenly thrust the receiver out at arm’s length as the screaming began.  Seth could hear every word.

_I HATE THIS PLACE SO GOD DAMN MUCH!  THEY’RE ALL SO FUCKED UP MAM, MAM, GAWD, I DON’T NEED THIS!  I DON’T NEED NO FUCKIN’ HELP!  PLEASE LET ME COME HOME!  I PROMISE I’LL BE GOOD!_

But staff intervened at that point, and Molly hung up after a brief word with one of them, shaken.

The silence drew longer.  Molly and Calvert received invoices for Pickles’ wanton destruction, but at the three week mark they suddenly dropped off.  Though his parents puzzled about this and then expressed their hope that it was working, Seth knew that Pickles would not have learned.  He had merely worked out a way to turn his situation around – somehow, some way... somewhere out of Tomahawk, Pickles staring in a mirror at his long red hair and scratched face, placing his hands against the glass: _If you want crazy, if you want fuckin’ crazy, I’ll show you how to be crazy..._

Sure enough, the phone calls came and Molly and Calvert would not let on what it was at first.  But something.  Seth knew how cunning that kid was; any silence was danger when it came to Pickles, and now it had been silent for four weeks.  Molly was visibly upset, and by the phone calls in week five, started to wonder aloud if they should bring him back.  Seth did not say anything, he didn’t care either way except that their eyes followed him closer when Pickles was gone.  But when it ended, when Molly got the call, he was home and eating cheezits in front of _Thundercats_ , and he didn’t hear any yelling at all.  Only Molly, _yeah, yeah, I see, oh dear,_ abruptly hang up the phone, and then call for Calvert at the top of her lungs.

Seth came with them this time.  A long drive to an adjacent town, the sun going down outside as he gazed out the window, slumped in the back seat.  When they stopped again it was at a hospital, and Seth waited in the car while his parents went in to collect their eldest.  Seth thought maybe Pickles had tried to kill himself, cut himself open or hanged with his bedsheets or something, but when he appeared again, his skinny wrist locked into the hem of his shirt and his hair matted around his gaunt face, his clothes just hanging off him, it was obvious what he’d done.  He climbed in beside Seth, Molly dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex in the front seat of the car, and Calvert gently explained that Pickles had been treated for dehydration and a concussion after fainting, and would be coming home to recover now.

When he said this Pickles looked up at Seth through the gloom of the back seat, and the look in his eyes, black in the darkness, was like a starving dog.  Real desperate, real horror, real danger, full of the bloody taste of victory.  It was no accident that Pickles had fainted.  He had known what he wanted and set out to make it happen, and now Molly was so shaken, checking the rear-vision mirror for her children sitting in silence in the back seat, that there was no way he was being sent back again.  Pickles was fifteen, and he had faced off against his parents’ wills and won.  There was no turning back now.

On the first night of June, Seth came down to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a glass of water and found Pickles, dressed to disappear in jeans and tee and flannel and boots and a leather jacket that someone, somewhere out of town, had given him after his hospitalisation, standing over the sink and sawing at his long red hair with a kitchen knife until it came away in handfuls, dumped into the sink.  He just looked at Seth, moved aside to let him fill his glass, Seth looking into the sink at the copper bright clumps sodden by the tap.  Neither said a word, just let it happen.

When he was back in his room, Seth heard the engine of Calvert’s car rev and dashed to the window, pulling it open to see if it was, and it _was_ , Pickles, terrified and high on adrenaline, his tiny form in the driver’s seat and his jagged short hair spilt over his face, edged the car cautiously onto the street.  He hesitated a moment once he was out of the driveway, as if he couldn’t believe God hadn’t reached right down and plucked him from the street in punishment, and then – tasting the riotous joy of the thing – slipped the car into gear and slammed his boot on the accelerator, rocketing off into the night with a screech of tyres.

Seth had never seen _anything_ so fucking cool.  That kid was something _else_ , dude, and there was no bringing him down now.

Calvert swearing in the morning, stomping through the house to the phone to call in late for work.  _If you’re going to steal my car, at LEAST make sure there’s enough gas for my commute!_   And Molly’s screaming when she found her daughter’s beautiful red hair lopped off and scattered over the kitchen lino in tiny copper darts.  Pickles nowhere to be found.

That summer they barely saw him.  Sometimes in the day, smelling of smoke or cannabis, playing drums in the basement while Calvert was at work and then vanishing in the afternoon, before the man could come home again.  A no-show at school.   Seth saw him sometimes in town, the bright red of his jagged mullet like a beacon, smuggling bottles under his biker jacket.  Some kids said he drank under the rail bridge again, or huffed petrol.  All of it Seth believed.  Pickles, nobody's fucking daughter.  An incomprehensible, teenage chaos.  It had to be a matter of time.

The last time that Pickles got arrested, Seth heard the police car stop outside their house and the voices of the cops before he looked out the window.  They’d even handcuffed the kid this time, talking to an exhausted Calvert on the doorstep as the neighbourhood held its breath.  His car had been impounded, and Pickles was to go to court, having been pulled over, drunk, with another underage girl in the driver’s seat.  She had been terrified of the cops, but Pickles was remorseless, cocking his chin at Calvert.  When they were back inside the house, Seth heard Pickles’ bite: _You can’t make me do shit._   And then the snap of Calvert’s palm.

_I’m just waiting for the phone call to tell me you’re dead._

In late autumn, Pickles would turn sixteen.  The first warning Seth had that something was about to change was his presence one Saturday, watching cartoons in the lounge, and Pickles had plopped down on the couch beside him and just watched in silence with him.  He remembered this, that Pickles smelt of beer and sat with his legs up on the arm of the couch, his knees showing through the holes in his trousers, and that this was the first time in nearly three years – an eon for a fourteen year old – that they’d sat quietly with each other like that.  Pickles had grimaced at the TV, said, “Is that _Rambo?_ ”

“Yeah.  He works for the government now.”

“Shit, cartoons have _changed_ , man.” 

Then he sat in silence again, a kind of sadness to the way he frowned at the cartoons.  Seth offered him the box of sugary cereal he was eating, but Pickles didn’t take him up on it.  Finally, after about an hour of only occasional comments, Pickles said, “You’re too old for this kiddie crap,” got up, and left.

It only lasted another two weeks.  Calvert coming home early, drum sticks thrown at the floor, screaming.  An argument up and down the stairs, about drunkenness, about slut, about how Pickles brought disgrace to their entire family.  Pickles screaming down the stairs, his boots thudding on the carpet.  _I’m not a fuckin’ slut! I’m not a fuckin’ GIRL.  Yeah, YOU HEARD ME._

Which Seth had known for years.  He didn’t realise what it meant, still didn’t realise the consequences of it, but he’d known.  In the room adjacent to his, Pickles scuffled and banged around, pulling out drawers and dumping them on the floor, and when Seth poked his head around the doorframe he saw him stuffing his clothes and books and keepsakes into a camping bag from trips long past.  But quickly pulled back without saying anything, closing his bedroom door on the scene. 

Eventually he picked it up, his sneakers squeaking on the wooden floor, and went downstairs.  No screaming, nothing new or strange, just Calvert keeping watch in the living room as Pickles passed, Calvert’s quiet voice: _Get out of here._

And then the door slam.

It wasn’t unusual for Pickles to be absent from breakfast.  It wasn’t unusual for Seth to walk alone to school.  His parents said nothing, just left Pickles' room as it was – overturned, gutted – for one month, two, with no sign of him.  Then it was six months.  Then a year.  And life went on.  And no one said a damn word about it, too ashamed in their way, relieved in another.

In 1988, when Seth was fifteen, he was lying on the couch in front of the TV half watching MTV and half reading a comic while Molly fussed around him.  They'd gotten cable just a few months before and Molly liked the background noise of always having the damn TV on.  Seth liked the rock music, and after Pickles' exit their parents were a lot calmer about just a _boy_ liking heavy metal, so MTV was a begrudging background choice.  The interviewer was rambling about a new band, gushing.

_And with us, one of The groups.  They say the Stones to the ‘60s were the kings of their genre.  They say Aerosmith in the ‘70s was the same thing.  They say in the late ‘80s going into the ‘90s – oh, pardon me - it is these boys right here, Snakes N’ Barrels, out of Los Angeles, these guys come from all over the place._

Seth had heard some about this band.  Y’know.  They were opening for Mötley Crüe or something.  He’d seen the name about, but he didn’t know shit.  Molly fussed and plumped pillows, trying to drive her lazy son off the couch and maybe upstairs to do homework.

_Right here we got Sammy.  We got my man Tony right over here.  Snazz next to him._

Suddenly Molly was looking straight up, like she’d seen the devil, clutching one of the pillows.  “Seth!” she hissed, trying to get his attention, and Seth raised his head.

“Wuzzat?”

“Sethy!  Look!  It’s your – ”

_And Pickles, just Pickles.  Short and sweet, ain't that right?_

And it was Pickles, his pretty face shadowed by a black leather hat that hid his eyes, laughing at the joke.  But Seth would recognise him anywhere.  Talking about a new album.  On the fucking Headbanger’s Ball.  _Pickles._

God.  It was the coolest thing he’d ever seen.  That fucking  _bitch._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading as always, I thrive off comments.


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